Tough Love for Comics

A little over two years ago, DC launched their “One Year Later” revamp/relaunch, with a year-long weekly series 52 as its centerpiece. Layout artist Keith Giffen described the book’s appeal to fans:

I call [it] the NASCAR book, because nobody goes to a NASCAR race to watch the cars go around in circles. You go for the crash. You hope for that blistering, horrifying crash. People are going to be watching 52, waiting for us to screw up… it’s not going to happen.

And he was right; people came to 52 looking for blood, but the series never “crashed” off its weekly schedule and was generally well-liked. Its weekly successor, Countdown [to Final Crisis] may have not been as successful or well-liked, but no one could argue that it wasn’t on time! But while both 52 and Countdown kept running on time, these bastions of punctuality served as a smokescreen for the fiery wreckage that was DC’s Demolition Derby of Scheduling, a/k/a “Pretty Much Every Non-Weekly Book DC Published”. A lot of books have had production problems in the past two years, but when the history books are written the “Last Son” storyline in Action Comics will likely go down as The Didio Era’s biggest disaster. And trust me, there have been plenty of other candidates.
I have put this article together not to point and laugh at the bodies being hauled out of the twisted chrome and steel of Action Comics. I am not trying to personally impugn the creators, editors or their support staff, or complain about how I “deserve” a monthly fix of my favorite superhero. I’m sure everyone involved had their reasons, none of which I will pretend to know. I’m not even trying to make fun of a bad comic; when all is said and done “Last Son” is going to make a nice little hardcover collection. But this happened. This was a heavily promoted comic, the sort of thing that (like Secret Invasion and Final Crisis or what have you) received mainstream attention, promotional posters, previews posted on EW.com. This was expected to be big. And this is what happened to it. I feel like it deserves documentation. Here now, we present a timeline of how this humble six five part story came to be:

JULY 15, 2006: In what is to my recollection an unprecedented move, DC releases its October 2006 solicitations and solicits Action #844 with no actual content information:

ACTION COMICS #844
For information on this issue, please see the August issue of Previews!
On sale October 25 â€¢ 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

The timing of these solicitations was such that they were released a week before the San Diego Comic Con, where DC planned to make their Big Announcement.

JULY 21, 2006: After months of attempts at secrecy, Richard Donner appears to admit that he will be co-writing Action Comics a day early, appearing on a Friday panel at the San Diego Comic Con. Over the course of the weekend, Johns and Donner claim their collaboration on Action is “open-ended”, and promise to reintroduce Brainiac, a character Johns had been promising to bring back to since his abrupt disappearance in the 2005 Teen Titans/Outsiders crossover that preceded Infinite Crisis. Johns also claimed that he and Donner had plans to revamp Parasite, team Batman and Superman, and feature Lex Luthor mourning his dead “son” Connor Kent in the series. As of this writing, none of these things have happened, and will presumably never happen with Donner’s involvement.

AUGUST 21, 2006: Action #845, part two of “Last Son” is solicited for release on November 22, 2006.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2006: Action #846, part three of “Last Son” is solicited for release on December 27, 2006.

OCTOBER 16, 2006: Action Comics Annuall #10 is solicited for released on January 31, 2007. It replaces Action on DC’s schedule for the month of January.

OCTOBER 25, 2006: Action Comics #844 ships as scheduled.

NOVEMBER 13, 2006: Action #847, part four of “Last Son” is solicited for release on February 14, 2007. It is advertised as containing a 3-D section, and being sold in two editions: one
with 3-D section and accompanying glasses, one without.

FEBRUARY 12, 2007: Action #849, part two of a fill-in story by Fabian Nicieza and Allan Goldman, is solicited for release on May 16, 2007. Action #850, a stand-alone story by Kurt Busiek and Renato Guedes, is also offered for release on May 30, 2007.

FEBRUARY 14, 2007: This was the first scheduled date for the release of the fourth part of “Last Son”. It did not ship. Part three had not shipped by this point.

FEBRUARY 15, 2007: DC issues another press release, stating that Action #848 will not contain the fourth chapter of “Last Son”, nor will it appear in stores on March 28th. Instead it will contain the first part of a two issue story by Fabian Nicieza and Allan Goldman, and arrive in stores April 25, 2007. I can’t recall if this was actually announced after issue 849 was solicited with part two of this story, but I wouldn’t be shocked if that was the case.

MARCH 19, 2007: Action #851, which will TOTALLY FOR REALS be the fourth chapter of “Last Son” is solicited for release on June 27, 2007.

MARCH 28, 2007: Action Comics #847, a fill-in by McDuffie & Guedes, ships. It’s a month and a half later than Action #847 (“Last Son part 4”) was supposed to be, but it was rescheduled when the new content was announced.

MARCH 28, 2007: Oh yeah, this was also the second scheduled date for the release of the fouth part of “Last Son”. It did not ship.

APRIL 25, 2007: Action Comics #848 is released, about a month late.

JUNE 27, 2007: This was the third schedule release date for the fourth part of “Last Son”. You’d think the third time was the charm, but no.

JULY 4, 2007Action Comics #851, part four of “Last Son” is released. Depending on how you look at it, it is either one week, three months or four months late.

JULY-NOVEMBER 2007: Having pushed the finale of “Last Son” to the unsolicited Action Comics Annual #11, Johns and Donner are free to continue their Action run without Kubert. Donner’s involvement is short-lived, lasting only through Action #854-856, a three-part Bizarro story with Eric Powell art. Beginning with October’s Action #857, “Superman & the Legion of Superheroes” is written solely by Johns.

NOVEMBER 19, 2007: Action Comics Annual #11, the final chapter of “Last Son” is solicited for a release date of February 13, 2008.

JANUARY 2008:

FEBRUARY 13, 2008: Oh, what do you think?

MAY 7, 2008: Action Comics Annual #11, the finale of “Last Son” is released. This issue:
** is nearly three months late from its solicited release date
** had an initial solicited release date just over a year after the natural “fifth issue” of a monthly story would have been released
** is released nearly two years after what would’ve been the hypothetical “post-Up, Up & Away” launch date of the run.
** is published after about ten issues of Action have been released that take place “after” this issue.
** is released very nearly three years after Adam Kubert’s three year exclusive contract with DC was announced.

And there’s one last thing worth noting about the final chapter of “Last Son”; while they waited over a year so that Adam Kubert would be the sole artist of the story, they did not choose to afford any time to let Dave Stewart do the coloring. So after four chapters of this:

the final chapter is colored, competently but in a typical contemporary Photoshopped gradient/filtered style by Edgar Delgado:

I don’t know how long it typically takes Stewart to color a comic, but DC had long abandoned the “monthly” reader with “Last Son” by the time the final chapter was released last week. The real market here is for the collection, which would be an evergreen “blockbuster Superman story” graphic novel, like an extended Superman II with an unlimited effects budget. The shift in coloring will be, in my eyes, kind of jarring in collected form. Perhaps they can get Stewart to recolor the story? They had entire sequences of Infinite Crisis redrawn and redialogued for the collection.

Regardless, “Last Son” is finally complete. I don’t know what will become of the remainder of Adam Kubert’s DC exclusive, or if we’ll ever see these other stories the Johns/Donner team wanted to tell, but we have “Last Son”. Let us remember it every time a book we like is delayed a few weeks or a month, and we wish to hurl blogosphere invective at the creative staff.